Vista is taking up ~30Gb....normal?

My HD has 35GB taken up right now. I have Office 2007 and Matlab installed. So, basically Vista is taking up 30GB. I have Ultimate 64 edition. I feel like this is ridiculous. Any ideas/help?

 

System Restore is what's taking up your space - not Vista. System Restore typically uses about 20% of the space of the space on your hard drive, and Vista about 10 GB (higher the more drivers you have installed), so if you have a 120 GB (decimal) hard drive, 35 GB is about what you'd have taken up with 10 GB of Vista and 20 GB of System Restore points.

System Restore can be turned off by:

1. Go to Control Panel. Select Classic View on the left side.

2. Go to "System".

3. Choose "System Protection" from the options on the left side of the window.

4. Deselect "C:\" from "Automatic Restore Points".

I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you need more hard drive space, however. System Restore can be a great help if something goes wrong.

 

The Windows installation shouldn't take much more than approx. 10 GB of space.

 

Yeah thats´about the amount not more than 10 gigs.

Typically these things add up to the vista installation :

System restore ~ for XP it was 12% max of your hdd, i guess
Paperbasket ~ about 10% of your partition
hibernation file ~ hibernation writes all that´s contained in your ram to hdd
size is the amount of ram you have installed
swap file ~ about 2 times the amount of ram you have installed


you can save some space if you configure the amount of space you need for the paperbasket and the size of your hdd vista should use for restore points.

the swap file(s) and the hibernation file you won´t even see, until you switch on the "show hidden system files " option at windows explorer.
of course you should not mess with the swap files , but if you don´t need the hibernation feature you can turn this option off.

 

Vista allocates 15% of total drive space or 30% of free space (whichever is lower) for Volume Shadow Storage, which includes system restore points as well as previous versions of some files.

The link in my signature will tell you how to change that amount to anything you feel comfortable with.

 

Why not just clear system restore and those shadow copies?
Right click C, then Properties, then Disk Cleanup. Make sure to select the admin option. When the Screen loads, click the "More Options" tab, and select Cleanup on the second screen.

After it does it's thing, you can recheck your HD and see how much space that gave you. Of course, you will have to clear it periodically (weekly) to keep clearing shadow copies & new restore points.

 

Instead of turning off system restore, you could do what I do and just limit the amount of hard drive space it can use. In XP to do that all you had to do was move the "slider"; but unfortunately vista doesn't have this easy option. However you can still reduce the size in vista but you have to use the command line to do it. Keep in mind reducing that the size of system restore (as in XP) will reduce the amount of possible restore points.

If you are interested here is what you need to do.

1) Open command prompt (run command) with administrator privileges

2)To see how much space is currently allocated to system restore type-> vssadmin list shadowstorage

3)To resize the disk space allocated to system restore type-> vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=[your hard disk]: /On=[your hard disk]: /MaxSize=[how much space you want to allocate]

For example for drive C you would type-> vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=4GB (doing this will give system restore a maximum size of 4Gb)

4) You should then see a message saying Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association.

That is it your done...

 

Check out the disk space guide in my sig.

 

I agree 30 GB's is a lot, but unless you need those 30 GB for something else, just keep everything as is. The shadow files and restore points aren't going to kill your HDD.